There will be a protest in support of the hunger strikers this Saturday 13th March in Castle Square in Swansea City Centre from 12noon until 5pm. As well as higlighting the stuggle of Read the rest of this entry »

In Edinburgh, outside the offices of Group 4 Securicor (G4S), one of the largest private companies involved in the border prison industrial complex, running five immigration prisons in the UK and many more around the world at a considerable profit.

Titi Nzamba Bolele and her three children were snatched from their home in Adamsdown, Cardiff early in the morning of 26th January by seven immigration officers and taken to Yarl’s Wood Detention Centre, Bedfordshire, where they were detained for 18 days whilst there were unsuccessful attempts to deport them to the Democratic Republic of Congo, a war-zone, before being returned home.

“It was a very painful experience in the prison. We found ourselves in a place where, wherever you come out, they open the door, they lock after you, they open the door, they lock after you. And the children were not okay. They were asking me, ‘We want to go to school’. There were no schools. They were not eating good food. They couldn’t really play. They are being really stressed.”

According to Bail for Immigration Detainees (BID), in “Briefing Paper on Children and Immigration Detention“, every year around 2,000 children (the UK government refuses to release the exact numbers) are detained for the purposes of ‘immigration control’, under exactly the same conditions as adults. The UK government removed its immigration opt-out to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in September 2008. The Convention stipulates that detention shall only be used Read the rest of this entry »

Titi Nzamba Bolele, and her three children spent nearly three weeks in Yarl’s Wood detention Centre after a UK Border Agency snatch squad conducted a dawn raid on their home in Adamsdown and unsuccessfully attempted to deport them to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) – universally accepted as a war zone.

On Sunday 9th September, asylum seeker Jackie Aber & her son Naseem were seized by Immigration Officers & taken from their home in Swansea to Yarlswood detention prison. Jackie was tortured & raped by the Ugandan army, she escaped an army prison, entered the UK & claimed asylum. Although accepted by the Immigration Appellate Authority as a ‘believable witness’, the Home Office refused her asylum claim stating that she would not be in danger of persecution if she was returned to a differnet part of Uganda. Finding new evidence that she Read the rest of this entry »